Cray to Develop New Supercomputer to Manage Nuclear Stockpile

An XC30 supercomputer from Cray. A much bigger machine from the company is being installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Cray Inc.

Cray Inc. will develop a supercomputer for the National Nuclear Security Administration. The deal, worth $174 million, is one of the largest contracts in Cray’s history.

The supercomputer, named Trinity, is projected to be one of the fastest in the world when it’s built at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The NNSA, part of the Department of Energy, manages the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, a responsibility that includes running virtual simulations testing the stockpile’s safety, security, reliability and performance.

“They have to simulate the stockpile and understand how the weapons age, and as they develop new weapons, how they will work,” Cray CEO Peter Ungaro told CIO Journal. Mr. Ungaro said he could not say whether the supercomputer would be used to manage weapons in the event of a nuclear conflict.

Trinity will be a joint effort between the New Mexico Alliance for Computing at Extreme Scale at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories as part of the NNSA Advanced Simulation and Computing Program. NNSA is not revealing how fast the supercomputer will be when it’s finished.

Supercomputers such as Trinity are vertically integrated, which makes them different than the high performance computers used by Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and other Internet companies. The high capacity computing environment of Internet companies typically rely on so-called parallel-processing or breaking a computing job up into small bits and farming it out to many commodity servers at once.

For certain applications, such as modeling, simulation and certain types of analytics, a vertically integrated system works best, said Mr. Ungaro. That’s because those applications often rely on sequential calculations that must be completed in a certain order.

Aside from government agencies, corporations use supercomputers to model products and simulate testing of automobiles and airplanes in various weather conditions.

Cray, which sells both supercomputers and computing systems that rely on parallel processing, said that corporate customers have become about 15% of its business. “Even three years ago, we did very little business outside of government and major universities,” said Mr. Ungaro.

Cray’s shares rose nearly 16% Thursday in response to the news.

Intel noted that the Cray system will use future versions of both its conventional Xeon microprocessor chips and an add-on chip called Xeon Phi that is used to accelerate certain kinds of calculations.